In June of last year, our colleague, Alin Suciu brought a source of new Coptic papyrus fragments to the attention of our team.  These fragments, under the shelfmark Biblioteca Manoscritti 305 are housed in the Archivio di Stato di Lucca in Italy.

Of particular interest to me was a fairly large fragment from the book of Daniel, and it was with that main intent that I arranged a visit to the archive.

I visited the archive at the end of January and was able to consult the Daniel fragment.  An autopsy of the fragment enabled me to confirm Alin Suciu's identification of the fragment as coming from Daniel chapter 1.  This fragment forms an almost complete page from a codex.  This was a single column papyrus codex which would have measured not much more than 18 x 14.1 cm.  The margin is visible on one side of the page.  Specifically, the recto contains Dan 1:5b-8a and the verso 1:8b-10.

This attestation is of great help, as the only other witnesses of these verses in Sahidic are in sa 2050 and an ostracon (Var 18), which I am currently working on.  This is especially helpful with verse 7, which is entirely in a lacuna in sa 2050 except for the first word ⲁϥϯ.  Sa 2050 is housed in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris and is only the bottom portion of a page.  At some poin,t it is likely there was more to the fragment, as Maspero has a great deal more text recorded for Daniel 1:7 in his Fragments de Manuscrits Coptes-Thébains[1]. With the addition of the text from Lucca, one can almost completely reconstruct this verse.  In addition, a second attestation to these verses serves to establish a complete reading for these verses - something that is exceedingly difficult with the biblical Daniel corpus in Sahidic, which is so fragmentary that many sections are not attested at all, or are attested only by a singular manuscript.

There were many other fragments that I was able to examine. I was able to confirm that despite being under one accession number, these fragments were written by multiple hands and come from multiple different manuscripts.  Some fragments are unimodular, while others are bimodular.   In addition, the size of the letters varied significantly between some fragments, and some were written with a finer pen than others.  The most likely explanation for the variation among these fragments is that they come from multiple manuscripts.

There were many other fragments that I wished to more closely analyze, but was unable to due to time constraints.  Time was short, but I hope in the future another trip can be made to complete the initial work on these fragments.

I look forward to continuing to work with this archive in the future and hope that a closer analysis of the many fragments will yield more Old Testament attestations.

[1] Maspero, G., “Fragments de manuscrits coptes-thébains provenant de la bibliothèque du Deir Amba- Shenoudah,” Mémoires publiés par les membres de la Mission Archéologique Française au Caire 6 (1892) 268.